Cop

The most common special role. The Cop can investigate a player each night and find out whether they are on the Scum or Pro-Town side. Depending on the variation, sometimes they can discover the role name as well. Certain roles, such as the Godfather, can be immune to investigation.

A Cop can choose to reveal his role during the day, in order to get someone lynched. However, this is sure to make the Cop a target for the Mafia. The Mafia may also try to impersonate the Cop by claiming false results.

There are three common variations on the Cop role, typically called sanities:

• Insane Cop: Always gets incorrect results, i.e. "Guilty" for Pro-Town players and "Innocent" for Scum. Once the player realizes they are insane, they can generally produce effective results by reporting the opposite of what they discover.
• Paranoid Cop: Always gets "guilty" results. Rare in games with a Godfather, for obvious reasons. Once the Cop discovers their sanity, they may stop investigating, as all results are equally useless.
• Naïve Cop: Always gets "innocent" results. This may be the most common variant sanity used, as it masks Scum even if the Cop dies early.
• Random Cop (rare): There is almost never a place in a mafia game for this variation, because the randomness of the results prevents any valuable information from being gathered, including ones' own sanity. Games rarely last long enough to determine that results are truly random.

All variant sanities are uncommon in Mini Games or other situations with just one Cop in the game. When a cop who receives normal results needs to be distinguished from these, he is called a Sane Cop.

When a Game Moderator uses these roles, the player receiving the role is usually only told his/her role is Cop. Sometimes sanity is revealed upon death, but frequently not, leading to ambiguity if a Cop is killed early in the game.